My followers on Patreon got a sneak preview
of this interview in audio form. While supplies last, new Gonzo
Insiders get a copy of scott crow’s “Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams”
and some other fun goodies. Just donate $10 or more to be eligible.

I sat down with the anarchist organizer and author last month at my
house in Austin when he delivered some copies of his book, “Emergency
Hearts, Molotov Dreams: a scott crow reader” to use in my Gonzo
Giveaway.

While our paths cross frequently in the Austin activist community, I
don’t get a chance to formally interview him often. “Emergency Hearts”
features another, a three-part interview I originally published when I
edited for Firedoglake (now known as Shadowproof).

2017 was a historic year in so many ways, many of them disturbing
ones, and I wanted his perspective on what often seems like the collapse
of democracy as we’ve known it. As crow put it,

What a weird time in America, where we’re much more
liberal on one side, but we’re also much more conservative on the other.
I think that having the tiny-headed orange one in the White House has
been more disruptive than any other president I’ve seen in my life.

This part of the interview focuses on scott crow‘s
thoughts on the media and fascist propaganda, but I’ll share more in
future installments early next year, including a look at the present and
future of antifascism.

“Critical thinking is already difficult in America because it’s not
taught to anyone, and then over the last 20 or 30 years we’ve been
inundated with the 24-hour news cycle,” crow told me.

That cycle sped up over the past few years under the influence of
social media, then accelerated still further in the Trump era, as any
exhausted journalist can tell you. To make it all worse, the left
struggles to combat the growing influence of fascist trash like Infowars
(whose founder, Jones, crow referenced in this article’s opener), and
Infowars’ even weirder cousins where the worst of the worst memes like Pizzagate and QAnon fester and spread.

crow collaborates with Agency, an anarchist public relations collective, where one of his duties is to track the rise of fascist media online.

“I really started to pay attention to this in the fall, just before
Charlottesville,” he recalled. “Actually it was super terrifying to
watch.”

In particular, we were both horrified by the rapid spread of conspiracy theories around November 4,
a day of action called by the Revolutionary Communist Party (a small
but often disruptive communist splinter group), which the far right
transformed into an incipient civil war. YouTube flooded with dozens of
near identical videos, each one stoking fear and panic about what the
fascist right wing imagined might happen on that day.

YouTube
flooded with videos earlier this year designed to stoke fear, panic,
and violence from the far right on November 4, 2017. (YouTube
screenshot)

The claims about November 4 quickly spread from YouTube, reddit, and other more obscure places:

Alex fucking piece of shit Jones just began to say really
ludicrous and outlandish things. He was saying that antifa, antifascist
people were going to kill people on November 4, they were going to
behead people, they were going to have super soldiers with super serum.
This sounds like comic book stuff but then it gets picked up by more
quote unquote “mainstream” right wing news and then it makes its way to
Fox News.

“I was very worried,” crow recalled.

Luckily it didn’t materialize into massive numbers of fascists
showing up in the streets, “but the fact that they got that kind of
traction in all of these alternative media places is something that we
need to pay attention to.”

The darkest places on the internet have become a breeding ground for
these kinds of virulent misinformation. “The fact that this news can
spread — it’s not even news — this fake information, these conspiracies
can really spread in these places that we’re not even looking at is
something that progressive people or people with radical ideas need to
look at and address.”

Making the media landscape all the more challenging, the far right’s
propaganda outlets are funded by shadowy think tanks and rich
benefactors like the Mercers, while the independent media on the left fights over crowdfunding scraps.

“How do you combat that if you have anti-authoritarian and
anti-capitalist people who are trying to repel money to a degree?” crow
asked.

He didn’t have clear answers, but suggested it’s up to anarchists and
other radicals to develop a more nuanced take to the issue than the
corporate media and tech giants, which are coming down indiscriminately
against independent media in their quest to stamp out “fake news.”

“We have to recognize that this is potentially very dangerous,” crow said.

Just as antifascists believe fascists must to be stopped in the
streets by any means necessary, he suggested direct action will be
required to shut down fascist propaganda outlets like Infowars as well.

“We need to pay attention to these people; there needs to be a high cost for the hate speech they’re engaging in.”